The space shuttle Challenger is seen shortly before it exploded in 1986. (AP Photo/Thom Baur)

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"Next time I talk to [God], I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me,'" Bob Ebeling said in January of his nagging guilt over the Challenger disaster, which he tried to prevent as an engineer with NASA contractor Morton Thiokol. He may now get his chance. The 89-year-old died Monday in Utah, after a battle with prostate cancer, reports NPR. Raised in Illinois, Ebeling moved to Utah and became a rocket scientist with Thiokol in 1962, per the Salt Lake Tribune. He was one of five engineers who tried to stop the Challenger launch, fearing the booster rockets' O-ring seals would fail in the cold. "He said, 'The Challenger's going to blow up. Everyone's going to die,'" daughter Leslie Ebeling Serna remembers of the morning of the launch. "He was beating his fist on the dashboard. He was frantic." Afterward, "he wept—loudly."

Ebeling retired soon after and helped restore Utah's Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge after a flood. He served as a volunteer there over the following decades, earning the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Award in 1989 and the National Wildlife Refuge System Volunteer of the Year in 2012. Though he spoke about his persisting guilt over the Challenger disaster as recently as this year, Serna says it vanished before his death. Support for Ebeling had recently poured in, including from NASA, which said the disaster taught the agency "to remain vigilant and to listen to those like Mr. Ebeling who have the courage to speak up." "It was as if he got permission from the world," Serna says. "He was able to let that part of his life go." Ebeling put it best himself. "You helped bring my worrisome mind to ease," he said in thanking those who reached out to him. "You have to have an end to everything."

There wouldn't have been ANY problem had the "engineers" not banned asbestos from the O-rings which worked perfectly. They KNEW the new rings were FAILING, but they had double sets, so one set burned through, the second would hold for awhile. NASA became this environmentalist whacko group and still is. They can't do anything now. Utterly and completely worthless as a space agency but baby if you want bull shit about global warming, they have reams of it.

David Trainmore

Mar 23, 2016 12:21 PM CDT

My late dad saw the problem, the night before the Launch. So did the Russkies on the spy trawler, off shore. Someone put a LOX exhaust hose onto a wet metal surface, and the ice formed as clear frozen water. When this 'clear ice" recrystallizes, into the opaque surface we normally see, it destroys the surface integrity of the metal's surface. This cost a lot of early Twentieth Century loggers their lives in Northern Minn. and Michigan. You have to do static tests of any structure, to determine its remaining strength. Loggers know this, Russkies, from their Balkanor Cosmodrome in Kasakistan know this, Cocoa Beach Nasa dweebs don't, but what about the German Ex Pats, from Peenemünde, De? Did one of them deliberately sabotage the Challenger's 24th mission? Look at this mission's crew list from an ex Nazi's point of view. Its unsettling, to say the least.

Ezekiel 25:17

Mar 23, 2016 10:50 AM CDT

The sad deal is that the nasholes in charge at the time of that disaster, are still at their posts today.